Thread by @ScribblerPen

I had joined Twitter (pre X) to talk about Covid-linked chronic illness and advocate for employment rights, so people losing health wouldn't lose jobs. But I end up talking a lot about welfare because people do lose jobs, employers discriminate, and disability injustice is vast.

Covid is a special case study — disability discrimination began the instant the decision was made that some lives were expendable, ostensibly to protect others' "freedoms" (to get infected and disabled too, as it mostly turned out). But it's not unique, and solidarity is vital.

Six years on, many people don't know why their health is gone. Not just why they quickly get exhausted or can't remember what they were saying minutes ago. But why they've had a heart attack. Why they can't walk. Why they have waves of pain, sight, hearing, neurological problems.

Why they have gastric problems, pregnancies that go wrong, early menopause or aggressive diseases associated with chronic inflammation. Why their parents get early onset dementia. Why their children are ill all the time and struggle at school. Society has *chosen* not to answer.

But the upshot is more disability adding to existing disabilities, compounded by unequal health access, untreated conditions on waiting lists turning into disabilities, and people becoming disabled with age as their state pension age retreats. Welfare becomes a lifeline for many.

And so there isn't some unique, isolated case. People becoming newly disabled, for whatever reason, often don't know their rights, are discovering that employers don't accommodate them but dump them, and the safety net they'd assumed was there is not or it's a hostile nightmare.

It doesn't matter when or how you get here, but this is where you arrive: the disability space, full of toxic — and, as needs rise, rapidly toxifying — political narratives, discrimination and injustice. So we need to talk about welfare. Not because we want to — we are forced to.

We are forced, however ill or exhausted, to swim constantly against this toxic tide of lies and ignorance. Against lobbyists braying for and politicians delivering cuts and cruelty, the media manufacturing consent by actively disinforming or by passively parroting disinformation.

No matter which disability it is: lobby groups, media and politicians pick on them in turn. No matter what form of welfare: X trolls, TV and tabloids will rage-bait about it in turn.
Wouldn't it be nice not to talk about welfare — to talk about rights, workplace access instead?

Post-2020, almost 1 in 4 people in the UK now lives with some disability. It doesn't matter if they work or not, or what age they are, they'll get pulled into this cuts-motivated toxic soup.
It's as if we are not equal citizens and don't vote. But we are. And we do. And we will.

We can choose. Not to consume media that attacks us. Not to vote for MPs who don't represent us. Not to trust charities that get co-opted into injustice.
We'll win equality, compassion, fairness with or without them. Now back to welfare — though we didn't start that conversation.